Sunday, March 27, 2011

“The person who has not courageously confronted the basic unreality of conventional structures – including both individual and collective egocentricity, including as well the very notion of a substantial universe – can never sincerely love the Real or long for the Real, much less become Reality”……. ‘Great Swan: Meeting with Ramakrishna’

I came across this saying while reading John Major Jenkins book “2012 Story” and it was few days after the devastating tsunami that hit Sendai and the resulting nuclear disaster. The whole concept of technical development especially in the field of energy generation has been very wrongly derived. We tend to burn coal, split the atom or harness the water. For a moment look at the verbs used to describe these processes. To burn, split or harness is potent with an act of destruction and alienation from a natural state of existence, an existence of demonstrable symbiosis and mutual inclusion. A holistic understanding of how things work in nature and how that process can be redeployed without disruption has never been the agenda of technology developers.The wake up call has come with increasing disasters and climate change.Let us look at how science has tried to fathom its understanding of natural laws. It has increasingly used analytical methodology and a technique of fragmentation to probe reality. The futility of this process had been well understood by ancient wisdom traditions and spiritual masters. The words of Ramakrishna echo this anguish.

To understand Reality there must be an ego death. While the ego is fundamental to physical survival as a species, in our evolutionary journey it has hijacked practically every aspect of human existence. There was a disconnect from what indigenous wisdom traditions understood and a pure rational approach was deployed to seek greater understanding of the true nature of Reality. The pre-rational and trans-rational consciousness was consigned to a state of neurosis and dismissed. While scientific research and development employed the fragmented and rational route to comprehend reality, the ever widening increase between what solutions we were arriving at and what increasing questions these very solutions generated led us by an unshakable grip to understand that reality was far from our grasp. This journey of discovery began with the advent of Quantum Physics but has become more accentuated when we try to come up with an attempt to unite all the four fundamental forces of nature.Carl Jung says:

“it seems to me like an omnipresent continuum, an unextended Everywhere. That is to say, when something happens here at point A which touches upon or affects the collective unconscious, it has happened everywhere.”

It is mandatory that trans-rational consciousness be employed in seeking an understanding of our true nature as this is the domain of the universal unconsciousness.

This aspect has been brought out by Peter Russell in his book “The Global Brain, Speculations on the Evolutionary Leap to Planetary Consciousness” where he states:“We need to realize our essential oneness with nature, not just with our intellect and reason but with our feelings and with our souls. It must become an undeniable part of our reality.”

This is a stage of expanded consciousness or ego death. The experience can be frightening for some. Because all comfort zone are removed as all linkages to perceived reality is negated. Following ego-death, or the destruction of the individuals 'self', what remains is intense, non-reflective (or non-self-conscious) consciousness, the radiant 'Self' (presumably, this is the same 'Self' as revealed in Vedic texts such as the Bhagavad-Gita and the Upanishads, the same as experienced during states of 'Cosmic Consciousness', and the same as experienced by religious mystics).This is the state where all conventional structures are disbanded. What it involves in trying to achieve this state will be the topic of the next post.

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